Although nearly 40 percent of the 35,000 voter registration applications submitted in Harris County by a community-organizing group accused of fraud in other states were rejected, there is no evidence of intentional manipulation of the voter rolls here, according to the county's voter registrar.

Elections officials in more than a dozen states are investigating reports that the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, submitted fraudulent registrations. Republican leaders have called for a federal investigation, and GOP presidential nominee John McCain has been using connections between the group and his Democratic rival, Barack Obama, as fuel for attacks in the final weeks of the campaign.

About half of the 14,000 ACORN applications that were rejected in Harris County were missing required information such as the potential voter's address, date of birth and Texas driver's license number, said Paul Bettencourt, the county's voter registrar and tax assessor-collector. Another 3,800 applicants already were registered to vote.

Bettencourt said his staff checked the voting rolls and did not find any obviously phony registered voters. His bigger concern is the time his staff wastes processing duplicate applications. By comparison, only four duplicates were found among 4,000 applications submitted by the League of Women voters, and five have been found in 3,300 applications submitted by the Harris County Democratic Party.

"It keeps the engine going at a high rpm with no output," Bettencourt said of ACORN's high duplicate rate.

Group tries to verify data

Catherine Blue, state political director for Texas ACORN, said her organization does everything it can to make sure its employees help unregistered prospective voters fill out the applications thoroughly and properly. Each application is then reviewed by other staff members, who attempt to reach the prospective voters by telephone to verify their information.

"We do everything we can to have a high quality control and we will continue to improve it in future years," she said.

ACORN's employees spent months visiting bus shelters, public hospital waiting rooms, job centers and welfare offices in an effort to register young people, minorities and poor and working-class voters. At the peak of its registration drive this summer, about 30 workers were on the streets with a goal of signing up 20 to 25 new voters every day.

ACORN defends its effort

Because ACORN targets the nation's most disenfranchised residents, it's likely that many people filled out numerous applications because they wanted to be extra sure they really were registered, Blue said.

"When you have only 61 percent getting on the rolls, people have a justifiable reason to wonder whether or not when they fill out an application it's going to put them on the rolls," she said.

She acknowledged that a few staffers had been dismissed for registering themselves and other people over and over again, but said it was an isolated problem that was dealt with quickly.

Randall Dillard, a spokesman for Texas Secretary of State Hope Andrade, said no problems involving ACORN or any other group voter registration effort had been brought to their attention.

More than 13,000 ACORN workers in 21 states have registered 1.3 million people, according to the group's Web site. The organization defended its national voter registration effort in an online statement, saying only a tiny fraction of its applications had problems. Applications with missing or false information are separated from the rest of the batch and flagged for elections officials, the statement said.

ACORN flagged about 100 applications in Harris County, Blue said. She did not know why so many more were rejected as incomplete, because Bettencourt's office does not tell them what they were missing. The group has heard anecdotally that some rejected applications had minor problems, she said.

Bettencourt said his office's computer system is not set up to track why applications are deemed incomplete. But he rebuffed suggestions that applications were rejected for specious reasons.

"Don't give me an incomplete registration and expect us to fill it out," he said.